22 May 2013 8:29 PM

Not many people read or hear
the Book of Common Prayer these days. Most of the clergy of the Church of
England give the impression of disliking it, some are viciously hostile, and
churchgoers have to hunt around for services that use it.

Comedians don’t
even make fun of it. You might have thought all that archaic language would
have been an easy target, but perhaps memories of the old church services have
all but died out, or perhaps something about them defies mockery.

Observe how
when Rowan Atkinson goes on Children in Need, he chooses to take the rise out
of the way modernising archbishops talk. He gets complaints for incorporating
modern sexual slang.

Political
leaders, even those who have had the benefit of an expensive education, give
the impression they are unfamiliar with Thomas Cranmer’s prayer book. This is a
pity, because the Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549, was a
foundation stone of the emerging English nation and guided the institutions of
the country for centuries.

Its wording was,
for example, adopted by the Victorians for the non-religious civil marriage
ceremony. The old register office legal vows were altered by legislation less
than 20 years ago, at the prompting of a Roman Catholic Tory MP concerned
mainly about anti-Catholic discrimination.

So if you want to
get a grip on England’s historic understanding of the institution of marriage,
you could do worse than refer to the prayer book, which says ‘it was ordained for the procreation of children, to be
brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy
Name.’

Pretty clear I think. What else?

‘Secondly, it was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid
fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry,
and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body.’

Shades of Rowan Atkinson there. That may be why our clergy are
now so shy of the old prayer book. But you can’t misunderstand.

And?

‘Thirdly, it was ordained for the mutual society, help, and
comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and
adversity. Into which holy estate these two persons present come now to be
joined.’

You can argue with some effect that points two and three speak
in favour of same-sex marriage. Unfortunately, if you want to maintain that
same-sex marriage is in keeping with the finest British tradition and practice,
you have a problem with point one.

The more so since the BCP goes out of its way to insist the
marriage ceremony involves ‘this man and this woman’.

One further thing about the old prayer book. It has a quaint
old ‘table of kindred and affinity’, which lists at length the relatives people
may not marry, starting with their own children and stretching to son’s son’s
wife and daughter’s daughter’s husband. This is where 16th century religious
doctrine and practicality met.

The essential prayer book kith and kin rules still apply,
through the 1949 Marriage Act which remains the basis of marriage law.

So when Culture Secretary Maria Miller told the Commons during
the same-sex marriage debate that ‘people should not be excluded from marriage,
simply because of who they love’, she was saying something that departs
radically from previous understanding.

When she told MPs that the values of marriage are the values
upon which society is built, and ‘they must be values available to all,
underpinning an institution available to all couples,’ she was talking through
her hat.

When she told the Commons that marriage has evolved, that
evolution has been strictly limited. Easier divorce, yes. Weddings in stately
homes, yes. A public lifetime legal bond between a man and a woman? That only
began to change in October 2011, at the Tory Party conference, thanks to the
Prime Minister.

David Cameron spoke on BBC Radio Four’s Today Programme
following the debate. He said: 'I think marriage is a
wonderful institution, it helps people to commit to each other. I think it’s
such a good institution it should be available to gay people as well as
heterosexuals.’

This is not a conservative
position. It is a call for upheaval.

Mr Cameron and Mrs
Miller may well be right when they say that same-sex marriage is the right
thing to do, that it will spread the benefits of marriage, and that it brings
Britain in line with what is happening in the rest of the developed world.

The alarm felt by their
critics may well be misplaced.

But when Mr Cameron says
he supports gay marriage ‘because I’m a Conservative’, he needs to understand
why conservatives might decide they are no longer Conservatives.

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15 May 2013 7:11 PM

At what point did the spying
trade turn into a branch of the public relations industry?

I blame Alastair
Campbell, who, confronted with the necessity of selling an unpopular war,
redefined the Secret Intelligence Service as an auxiliary spin machine. The
proper role of Britain’s spies, Campbell maintained, was to supply propaganda
material for the Prime Minister to feed to the media.

It is not clear
that the chieftains of MI6 were wrong when they obediently followed Campbell’s
instructions and tried to make it look as if they really believed Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

No good in
upsetting the government, what with all those salaries to be paid and lots of
cooks and cleaners to keep going at that silly headquarters in Vauxhall, not to
mention the office heating bills.

But look where
it has all led. Now we have an unfortunate American junior diplomat arrested in
Moscow in front of the cameras and paraded all over Russian TV wearing a daft
blonde wig, in the company of a number of embarrassed-looking superiors.

Ryan Fogle, said
to be a CIA agent, is accused by the Russians of ‘provocative actions in the
spirit of the Cold War’, or, more specifically, trying to recruit a Russian
informant.

The Russians
have always made very good spies. But when it comes to spy literature they are
a bit behind the curve. And their PR hasn’t improved since the days when GUM
was the only department store in Moscow and its windows displayed tins of
sardines and Rosa Klebb-brand lingerie.

Memo to the
Lubyanka: if you want people to believe your spy capture coup, forget the wigs.
Both of them. And the sunglasses. And the map and the knife. And the compass,
please. Watch the western movies more carefully – even in something as dated as
the James Bond franchise they use satnavs now.

In particular,
everyone is going to laugh at the notion that American spies present their
Russian informers with letters of contract. ‘We eagerly await the possibility
of working with you in the near future,’ indeed.

I don’t
remember that George Smiley’s Moscow Rules had anything about letters of
appointment for agents. The main methods of recruitment in the good old days
appear to have been blackmail and bribery, which are rarely conducted in
writing.

All this dreadfully
crude stuff just undermines the point you are trying to make about those evil
interfering Americans, whatever it might be. Probably along the lines of ha-ha,
you decadent USA, your spies are so stupid compared to our hot tottie Anna
Chapman, or something equally significant.

Perhaps the
Russians feel ignored now the world domination stakes of the Cold War have
declined to the point where most serious Russian threat comes from their
gangsters bumping each other off in London. Some innocent bystander might get
hurt one day.

The trouble is
that there is still a use for properly conducted spying. The Americans might
have captured the Boston bombers before it was too late if they had bothered to
listen more carefully to Moscow about suspicious Chechens.

American
interest seems to be pointed elsewhere. Very successful so in some cases.
Witness the superb Stuxnet coup, in which a computer worm that started off
alarming every technology geek in the western world turned out to be damaging
only when introduced into nuclear centrifuges in an Iranian bomb factory.

Perhaps there is
Washington activity in London too. We discover that the Bloomberg news agency
has been selling £13,000-a-year information terminals – sort of up-dated stock
market tickers – to the Governor of the Bank of England Sir Mervyn King and his
senior colleagues. Then the agency’s journalists have been looking at what Sir
Mervyn’s been looking at.

Just Bloomberg
journalists? Really?

In contrast with
adventures in Moscow, this trick is as safe as houses. If a journalist from
News International were to so much as ask for Hugh Grant’s mobile number, there
would be half a dozen dawn raids followed by the establishment of a 120-strong
Met Police detection team and, a year later, serious criminal charges.

Being that the
Bloomberg affair involves bankers, the City, and very large sums of money,
nothing criminal can have happened.

Our own boys and
girls are capable of pulling the odd stunt with technology when they put their
minds to it. A few years ago, before the Athens Olympics, the Greek government
felt it needed a new secure mobile phone network. It turned out that Vodafone,
who are based in Newbury, had just the thing they needed.

The new system
worked like a dream, throughout the Olympics, putting the Greek prime minister
in instant contact with his cabinet and his military, security and police
chiefs. And also MI6.

The Greeks were
rather angry when they found out, a couple of years later. They have probably
calmed down a bit now that they have other things to worry about.

I would like to
think there is still some properly applied spying going on behind the PR
puffery. There are certainly plenty of worthwhile targets.

The Security
Service could start by finding out, in advance of the last Premier League
fixtures, which Italian restaurant the Tottenham team plan to gather in on
Saturday evening.

07 May 2013 1:26 AM

For example,
there was a Radio Five football talk-in last week that was trying to find
suitable pop songs to mark the fate of various figures at the end of the
season.

Well, for Neil
Warnock, we’ll have Bo Diddley singing Mona. Jose Bosingwa of poor relegated
QPR must have the Beatles: how can you laugh when you know I’m down? It’s just
too simple, like taking candy off Perry Groves.

Similarly,
it should not be too difficult for the football authorities to work out the
solution to the Luis Suarez problem.

I take into
account that you would not in ordinary circumstances trust the average
administrator involved in running football to cross the road by himself. I understand
that we are dealing with a business whose chieftains, having got themselves
into a bit of a tangle over racism, thought it was a good idea to invite
sensitive comedian Reginald D. Hunter to tell the odd colourful joke at an
awards dinner.

But have none of
them ever watched Silence of the Lambs?

All the time
these days you see players wearing odd ancillary headgear that looks like it
was bought from a bondage website. Chelsea alone have a goalkeeper who
resembles Brainiac and a striker who takes the art of hiding to the point of
hiding his identity with a mask.

For some
players, face coverings should be compulsory rather than optional. Suarez would
no longer chew on his opponents if required to play with the mask that so
became that other notorious biter, Hannibal Lecter.

That way we also
get another football tune. Suarez can have Lecter’s favourite aria from the
Goldberg Variations.

Politics too can
be a simple matter, as the success of Nigel Farage illustrates. You just take
everything the voters hate and do the opposite, and, hey presto, people will
vote for you.

How Mr Farage
must have enjoyed his bank holiday after reading of the Coalition’s latest
attempt to counter UKIP success. As a demonstration that they really do not get
it, you could not ask for better.

The new plan,
apparently to be included in the Government’s legislative programme, will stop
state pensions going to nasty foreigners who have ‘never set foot in Britain at
all’. The LibDem pensions minister, Steve Webb, complains that under the
present system 220,000 people outside the country are getting state pensions
based purely on their spouse’s work history.

‘Folk who have never
been here but happen to be married to someone who has are getting pensions,’ Mr
Webb said.

How brilliant of Mr
Webb to upset all those people tempted to vote for UKIP all over again twice in
one scheme.

First, he has
taken what is about the one genuinely contributory benefit left in the welfare
system and attacked it.

It probably occurred
to a minister from a party that took a bit of a caning in last week’s elections
that the benefits system is not very popular. What Mr Webb
hasn’t worked out is why.

It is mainly
because lots of people are getting something for nothing out of it. Every poll
and survey is suggesting that the great majority of the country wants to see a
benefits system which pays out instead to those who have contributed something.

Mr Webb can’t
see this at all. You may remember that back in 2005 he was found to have
claimed £545 in tax credits because of his low MP’s salary, despite also
claiming £113,258 in parliamentary expenses.

Benefits, taxes,
they’re all the same, you see, in Webbworld, so there’s nothing wrong with
claiming a benefit aimed at the poor even though you are most definitely not
poor, as long as you can fit in with the letter of the rules.

Then, secondly,
there is that troubling reference to people who ‘happen to be married’. Pretty
much like they might happen to be a QPR fan or happen to catch flu.

Mr Webb thinks
it is wrong for all these foreigners to get a share of their spouse’s state
pension just because they are married.

In
Webbworld, someone who has earned a state pension should not expect payments to
his wife to continue after he dies, because she is a foreigner and because
marriage shouldn’t count for anything.

David Cameron
has a bad blind spot about marriage. He promised tax breaks for married couples
because he thought it would reassure the reactionaries, and then dropped the
idea as soon as he was safely inside Downing Street.

In its
place he offered same-sex marriage, introduced, in one of the most
self-destructive phrases ever coined by a politician, ‘because I’m a
Conservative.’ One poll last week suggested same-sex marriage alone
disillusioned a quarter of the Tory voters of 2010.

Perhaps Mr
Cameron was happy to see Mr Webb start the fightback against UKIP because Mr
Webb went to a comprehensive school. No chumocracy there. Ding! Box ticked.

And the pensions
minister was being disparaging about foreigners. Mr Cameron appears to take the
view that all this fuss about immigration is because lots of Tory voters are
xenophobic, so he had better do something mean to foreigners. Ding! Box ticked.

The trouble with
Mr Cameron is not that he is failing to get his message across, nor that he has
miscalled the loyalty of right-wing voters, nor that he is too ready to tie
himself to unpopular minority causes. The trouble is that his judgement is
poor. Reading a list compiled by one pundit, I got to more than a dozen
unnecessary disasters before I gave up counting, and that didn’t even include
his law for higher foreign aid spending.

When he pitched
himself as the heir to Blair, Cameron forgot the Marxist cliches he must have
been stuffed with while doing PPE at Oxford. In particular, the one about
history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as
farce.

Mr Webb’s
attempt to boost the Coalition’s fortunes just underlines that the Tories have
something to learn from the easy simplicities of football. When things go
wrong, sack the manager.